How to Create a Mind

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About the Book

No recent futurist has been more influential (or, in some quarters, more controversial) than Ray Kurzweil. His optimistic vision of the Singularity?the point at which man and machine are melded into a new entity, expounded in his bestselling The Singularity Is Near ?has been welcomed and challenged in equal measures as the next logical step in human evolution. Although a single chapter in The Singularity Is Near discussed the brain, in the eight years since that book was published relevant technologies to examine the brain have become a hundred times more powerful, which are beginning to enable us to reverse-engineer the brain and fully understand its workings. We have already succeeded in doing so for the auditory and visual cortex, but the great project is to understand, model, and simulate the cerebral cortex, the origin of ideas, and a uniquely human capability.How to Create a Mind will, like Singularity, present an overview of the state of current technology (in which the amount of data that we gather about the brain doubles each year) as well as offering predictions for what can be achieved within the coming decades, both in terms of amplifying human intelligence and applying newfound knowledge to machines. In it Kurzweil will discuss in depth how the brain works, how the mind emerges from the brain, and the implications of vastly increasing the powers of our intelligence in addressing the world's problems. He will also examine such topics as emotional and moral intelligence and the origins of consciousness, addressing philosophical issues that have engaged humankind for centuries. As in Singularity, he will consider the effects of our merging with the intelligent technology we are creating: once we have nonbiological intelligence in our brains, which will be the case by the 2030s, it will open them to thinking in ?the cloud, ? the vast, interconnected worldwide network of communication. By the time we finish fully modeling the brain in two decades? time, we will have computers that are more than millions of times more powerful than it.Thanks to Ray Kurzweil's tireless advocacy and promotion, How the Mind Works is certain to be one of the most widely discussed and argued-about science books of the year, taking its place alongside his previous classics.